There’s a lot of buzz in the physics community about the Higgs boson, namely that research teams using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have found it.
Physicist Tommaso Dorigo drops some hints here, and Philip Gibbs suggests the particle may have been identified with a signal of 5 sigma (suggesting a very statistically significant find). Wired magazine has an overview of the rumors here, and concludes that physicists will probably announce the discovery of the Higgs at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which takes place in Melbourne, Australia, July 4 to 11.
If this does occur I wanted to, in advance, provide an explanation of why this is significant so that readers can appreciate the discovery all the more.
The Higgs boson is a particle that scientists have theorized should exist if our conceptions of matter are correct, but heretofore they’ve never been able to observe it. The approximately $10 billion Large Hadron Collider was built with the primary purpose of finding the Higgs. With that kind of money at stake you know it’s something scientists are really, really interested in finding.
So why the hullabaloo?
Scientists want to understand why particles — like electrons and protons — have mass. Without “mass” you or I or planets or stars could not exist. And for a long time scientists have been digging into quantum mechanics, trying to find the roots of mass. They believe the Higgs is key to this.
They’ve been looking in “fields” in the realm of quantum mechanics, that is the realm of atoms and even smaller particles. Quantum “fields” are hard visualize, but we can more readily understand an electric field. At any given point in space, and at any particular time, we can measure the strength an electric field. If it has a non-zero value at some location it can have physical effects, such as causing a spark. These fields can also generate waves, such as X-rays.
In this electric field there are ripples, or tiny particles, called photons. Similarly, in quantum mechanics, our best scientific theories predict that there is a Higgs field that gives fundamental particles their mass, and the Higgs boson is a ripple in that field.
What is the strength of the Higgs field? Scientists don’t know.
Why does the Higgs field even exist? Scientists don’t know.
Answering these questions lie at the heart of finding the Higgs. Scientists hope that by understanding the properties of the Higgs boson, and consequently its field, they can begin to address some very fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. If it exists, then with the Standard Model of Physics, we’re probably on the right track of understanding the basic building blocks of the universe.
If it doesn’t we’re probably on the road to discovering some really awesome new physics.